Generation Nowhere: Rethinking Youth through the Lens of Un/under-employed Young Men
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Recent geographies and sociologies of youth frequently emphasize three inter-linked but distinct themes regarding young people’s lives: the decline of class, fluid identities, and transformation in young people’s political strategies. First, the notion that class has become less important in shaping young people’s futures has become a powerful argument within contemporary geographical and sociological writing on youth (Jamieson, 2000). Studies proclaiming the decline of class include work on youth and space (Valentine, 2003), youth strategies in contexts of economic insecurity (Roberts et al., 1999; Coté, 2002), and young people’s transitions to adulthood (Dwyer and Wyn, 2001). Beck (1992) has been especially influential in arguing that the rise of the welfare state, increasing material wealth, and the emergence of more flexible, insecure, competitive labor markets led to a decline in the importance of class in western capitalist societies (see Wallace and Kovatcheva, 1998; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Beck argues that the increasing importance of individual skill and the emergence of new forms of social differentiation have reduced the power of class to determine people’s life trajectories. In elaborating on what he calls the “individualization of society”, Beck also argues that young people now experience social and economic marginality on a personal basis and participate infrequently in collective forms of social and political expression. In this view, young people’s social networks are poorly developed, and, when they do exist, traverse class boundaries.Beck’s ideas about the decline of class as a basis for understanding young people’s trajectories have been widely applied within youth geographies (Valentine, 2003) and sociologies of young people (e.g. Dwyer and Wyn, 2001) and they have also influenced “new anthropologies of youth” (Bucholtz, 2002). Scholars have shown how social and economic transformation has created what McRobbie (1994: 262) calls powerful “splintering mechanisms” that frustrate efforts to link social outcomes to class. Indeed, evidence of a disruption in stable processes of class reproduction has provoked a search for new non-linear metaphors of youth “pathways”, “trajectories”, “niches” and “navigations” (Evans and Furlong, 1997). A second theme of recent youth geographies concerns young people’s identities, and Beck’s theoretical ideas have been influential here as well. In addition to arguing that class is less important economically and socially, Beck maintains that class has become less relevant as a cultural identity. In this view, late capitalist transformations in the realms of politics, society and culture have led to the emergence of more plural, fluid, overlapping types of identification that rarely correspond with a person’s class of origin. As Furlong and Cartmel (1997: 7) put it, “whereas subjective understandings of the social world were once shaped by class, gender and neighbourhood relations, today everything is presented as possibility.” This argument bears some similarities to influential post-structuralist theories emphasizing the performative nature of individual subjectivities and the irreducibility of cultural styles to underlying class positions. Butler (1990) has been especially important in arguing that people’s notions of themselves as political and gendered subjects emerge out of how they speak, dress, and move around: they are not the simple projection of background gender or class “identities”. As Hyams (2000) demonstrates in her work on Latina social strategies in the US and McDowell (2003) shows in her account of working-class masculinities in the UK, this emphasis on fluid subjectivities need not imply a rejection of class analytics. Indeed, class remains a strong theme of much ethnographic work on youth identities in the West (see especially Jamieson, 2000; Thomas, 2005; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006). But many youth scholars have used an emphasis on fluidity, hybridity and flux to challenge what they construe as a restrictive focus on class within earlier work on youth (see Valentine, 2003; Blackman, 2005).This emphasis on individualization and fluidity links to a third key argument running through much scholarship on young people. Many authors have argued that there was a marked decline in class- and party-political based activism among young people after the 1960s. Involvement in party politics has decreased (Cloonan and Street, 1998), young people are increasingly reluctant to vote in elections (Eisner, 2004), and political mobilization based upon class and ideology is waning (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Wyn and White, 2000). Wallace and Kovatcheva (1998: 255) use research in Europe to make the still bolder claim that all types of “formal” political action have become less common among young people who are now active only in “post-modern forms of protest – symbolic and cultural challenges to the dominant system of rules and regulations and dominant values and assumptions of good taste.” Scholars typically imagine these new forms of politics to be pursued through bodily display (Hyams, 2000), theatre (Kuftinec, 1996), dance (Redhead, 1993), new media (Valentine and Holloway, 2002), or non–material cultural forms, such as the “transmission of styles and music” (Wallace and Kovatcheva 1998: 207; see also Philo and Smith 2003). Some geographers and sociologists working in the global north contest this depiction of young people’s political action by pointing out the continued importance of class politics (Martin, 2002; Philo and Smith, 2003) or demonstrating the inseparability of old and new political forms in the lives of young people (McDowell, 2003). But the stress within recent research remains on a shift in the nature of young people’s political identifications and actions away from party- and class-based politics focused on the state and material concerns. As in the case of work on class structures and fluid identities, scholars making this argument about a decline in formal political engagement tend to present their conclusions as universally applicable to contemporary youth, usually imagined as educated, mobile, possessing access to phone and web technologies, and removed from immediate concerns over food and physical safety. III. Educated un/under-employment in the global south Roughly eighty-five per cent of the world youth population (aged between 16 and 30) live in Africa, Latin America and Asia. It is possible to identify three broad analytic sets of young people within this population on the basis of their educational and employment status. First, there is an increasingly thin upper stratum of young people, mainly men, who acquire high quality education in elite institutions and move smoothly into secure salaried employment, often within the professions or business. Contemporary concern in the West over the movement of jobs from Euro-America to areas such as India has provoked growing scholarly interest in this upper class, who are geographically concentrated within metropolitan regions of the global south and comprise a tiny fraction of the overall youth population. Recent research on these young men, and a still smaller set of young women among the elite, has focused on similar issues to those discussed in Western youth research: the emergence of more complicated pathways to adulthood (Fernandes, 2004), the cultural politics of consumption (Lukose, 2005), and rise of identity politics centred on the body (Liechty, 2004). A second set of young people in the global south lack access to secondary school education and engage in unpaid household labor or poorly paid manual, service or industrial work outside the home, often in gruelling and dangerous conditions. According to International Labor Organization statistics, 35 per cent of women and 59 per cent of men aged between 15 and 19 in the global south are engaged in paid employment (www.prb.org), and a very large section of the remaining young people are partly or wholly occupied in unpaid agricultural or domestic labor (e.g. Reynolds, 1991; Miles, 1998; Dyson, 2007). The experiences and strategies of working children and young people have been described in research on child labor (Wiener, 1991), child trafficking (Dottridge, 2002), and young people’s agricultural work (Nieuwenhuys, 1994; Dyson, 2007). This paper focuses especially on a third analytic set of young people comprised of those who have completed secondary school education but who have not moved swiftly into secure salaried work, and, within this set, on young men. The combination of a rapid increase in people’s investment in education and a shortage of salaried employment for high school and university matriculates has created a vast problem of educated un/under-employment among young people, which, while far from new, has became much more visible and intense in the 1990s and early 2000s in Asia (Jha, 2000; Ul Haq, 2003) Africa (Stambach, 1998; Silberschmidt, 2001; Bryceson, 2002), and Latin America (Levinson, 1996; Miles, 1998; Harriss, 2003). Widely different types of neo-liberal economic reform have usually failed to generate substantial numbers of jobs for skilled young people in the global south, especially in poorer regions (Bryceson, 2002; Harriss, 2003; Ul Haq, 2003). Economic reforms have reduced opportunities for government employment, historically an important source of salaried work for educated young men, and have often failed to generate large numbers of private sector jobs (Chandrashekhar and Ghosh, 2002; Harriss, 2003). At the same time, economic reform has led to the proliferation of images of success based on prolonged education and white-collar work. In addition, processes of economic restructuring have often increased the volatility of southern economies and therefore young people’s exposure to cycles of boom and bust (Ferguson, 1999). These processes have occurred at a time when young people – especially young men - are becoming increasingly important demographically in many parts of the global south (Cole, 2004; www.worldbank.org). Educated un/under-employment affects young women as well as men. Indeed, educated women seeking paid employment often suffer from a type of double subordination in poor countries, as young people excluded by economic and political structures from secure salaried work and as women seeking to challenge entrenched gendered ideas that restrict their access to paid employment outside the home (e.g. Miles, 1998; Miles, 2002; Sangtin Writers and Nagar, 2006). But evidence from areas as diverse as Mexico (Levinson, 1996), India (Ul Haq, 2003), and Papua New Guinea (Demerath 1999) suggests that young men comprise the majority of the educated un/under-employed and often experience their joblessness most acutely. This reflects strongly gendered schooling and employment strategies in areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where parents tend to privilege boys’ schooling over that of girls (Chopra and Jeffery, 2005) and prioritize find paid work for their sons (Miles, 1998). The pressures operating on young men also reflect the emergence of trans-national and regional discourses that construct young men in general, and un/under-employed men in particular, as wayward, dangerous and/or apathetic (Stambach 1998; McDowell 2003; Jeffrey et al. 2008). A prominent characteristic of educated un/under-employed young men is their social heterogeneity. This set of men include youth from the urban middle class, who have often acquired a long string of educational qualifications but find it difficult to acquire the type of professional or managerial career they desire (Liechty, 2004) and prosperous members of the peasantry keen to capitalize on their rural advantage in the competition for white-collar jobs (Berry, 1985; Jeffrey, 2001). But the educated un/under-employed also include young men from poor backgrounds, who have often been able to acquire high school qualifications while lacking the resources to obtain secure salaried work. It is therefore possible to refer to richer educated un/under-employed young men, who usually possess greater stocks of social connections and cultural confidence, and poorer un/under-employed young men, who tend to lack economic, social and cultural advantages. IV. Class and educated un/under-employed young men Class fractures young men’s experience of un/under-employment in the global south. Numerous scholars have remarked on the importance of money, social connections, and cultural goods in the efforts of young men to respond positively to economic insecurity. For example, in her research on urban Ecuador, Miles (1998) describes how educated un/under-employed young men from poor, rural backgrounds found it much more difficult to acquire status-saving fallback work than those from prosperous, urban backgrounds. As a result, many of the unemployed poor had been forced to migrate to the US in search of what they regarded as meaningful work. Demerath (1999) reinforces this point by showing that young men from urban, richer backgrounds in Papua New Guinea were usually able to sustain modern educated un/under-employed masculinities for much longer than those from poorer backgrounds. Similarly, building on field research in urban Madagascar, Cole (2004; 2005) distinguishes between a relative elite among educated un/under-employed young men who were able to find reasonably secure fallback work in the informal economy and a more truly marginalized cohort of men who more typically entered low-paid criminal work. Recent research in India shows how caste and class intersect to isolate and exclude educated un/under-employed young men from poor class and caste backgrounds. In many rural areas of north India, in particular, historic struggles between a dominant caste and various lower castes is now being replayed in the competition between educated un/under-employed young men for status-saving work within the informal economy (e.g. Dube, 1998; Jeffrey et al., 2004; Frøystad, 2005). For example, Jeffrey et al. (2004) use ethnographic field research in western Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) to argue that class, in combination with caste, shapes the opportunities for young men to strategize effectively within the field of educated un/under-employment. In the village in which Jeffrey et al. worked there was a marked divide between members of the middle ranking and locally dominant Jat caste, who controlled access to land ownership and local political networks and had good educational qualifications, and Dalits, who usually lacked access to land and political assistance and possessed devalued educational credentials. Educated un/under-employed Jat men had been able to utilize social connections with fellow caste members in urban areas to obtain reasonably secure work in the informal economy or become managers on their family farms. As a result, their experiences of personal failure tended to be short-lived. By contrast, Dalit young men among the educated un/under-employed lacked the money, social contacts and cultural traits required to find face-saving jobs in the informal economy, and they tended to suffer from more profound feelings of humiliation than those experienced by Jats. Indeed, many of Jeffrey et al.’s Dalit respondents spoke in heartfelt terms of the caste discrimination they had experienced in their efforts to find work. Class also acts independently of caste to marginalize the poor, as Parry (1999) has argued. In his ethnographic research around a steel plant in Bhilai, central India, Parry (1999) focuses on social divisions within a Dalit caste. He demonstrates that educated un/under-employed young men from wealthy, well-connected Dalit backgrounds were able to marshal their money and social contacts to obtain jobs in a local government steel mill. By contrast, Dalit families who did not possess a history of working in government found it difficult to acquire salaried jobs in the steel plant. Once working in the mill, young men from relatively prosperous Dalit backgrounds usually tried to distinguish themselves from poorer members of their caste by sending their children to English-medium schools, engaging in conspicuous consumption, and removing women in their families from manual labouring employment. In the field of youth cultures, scholars working in the global south have described the recent emergence of vibrant cultural practices of un/under-employed masculinity which are not explicitly linked to the class position of young men. While the nature of these cultures varies widely across the globe, certain dominant motifs tend to appear across individual cases. In particular, and broadly consistent with the young men belonging to “Generation Nowhere” in Meerut, several studies point to men’s efforts to emphasise their dislocation from broader processes of spatial and temporal change, affiliation with local notions of modernity, and detachment from work understood locally as demeaning. Heuzé’s description of the educated un/under-employed on the coalfields of central India encapsulates these themes: By remaining together in doing nothing, by refusing to participate in the domestic economy and to work in the fields, by dressing in city attire – college dress – and frequenting the main streets of Batipur and Bharu and the tea stalls located on the main road from Chandankiari to the mining basin, the educated unemployed assert themselves by drawing attention to the injustice meted out to them […] Waiting has become an art and may become a profession for the majority of India’s youth (Heuzé, 1996: 105). Such cultures of “waiting” are well attested in several other accounts of the educated un/under-employed in India (e.g. Parry, 1999; Anandhi et al., 2002; Jeffrey et al., 2004), Africa (Weiss, 2002; Cole, 2004) and Latin America (Miles, 1998; Harriss, 2003). In research in western U.P., Jeffrey et al. (2004) describe how young men seek to recover a sense of respect during this period of extended transition by cultivating urbane masculinities imagined as “educated”. These young men emphasized their own refined speech, clean clothes, and distinguished comportment as “educated people” and the alleged rough talk, filthy dress, and uncouth behaviour of illiterates. Jeffrey et al. (2004) emphasise the mischievous and playful nature of these youth cultures and their mutability. But social class structures young men’s ability to sustain cultures of unemployment. Unemployed identities tend to be expensive; consumer styles of un/under-employment drain young men’s resources, and efforts to project an unemployed identity by claiming to be part of a “Generation Nowhere” frequently entail refusing to engage in the demeaning paid work that is locally available, such as employment in manual labor. Parents are often willing to provide young men with trappings of an unemployed persona and forego the loss of income that accompanies young men’s refusal to work in manual labor, and, in some cases, young women work in manual labor to support their brothers’ idleness (e.g. Anandhi et. al. 2002). But in the face of competing calls on household resources, many young men from poorer backgrounds are forced to abandon their efforts to cultivate a sense of their educated un/under-employment (Levinson, 1996; Demerath, 2000; Jeffrey et al., 2004). For example, Jeffrey et al. (2004) show that access to parental financial support influenced educated young men’s ability to project themselves as educated unemployed in western U.P. Rich members of the dominant Jat caste had the resources to display an educated persona while the Dalit poor among the un/under-employed could not afford to buy the cinema tickets and city clothes central to an educated unemployed style. Hansen’s (2006) research on Indian taxi drivers in contemporary Durban, South Africa, parallels this account. Hansen describes how frustrated young men among the un/under-employed have increasingly entered the taxi business. Taxi businesses offer opportunities for young men to recuperate respect through projecting aggressive and self-confident masculinities onto the urban landscape and creating social nodes within networks of marginalized youth. But Hansen repeatedly emphasizes the importance of class in shaping the ability of these young men to pursue effective cultural strategies. Richer young men among the educated un/under-employed in Durban had purchased expensive, foreign-brand vehicles containing powerful music systems. By contrast, poorer members of the unemployed were usually compelled to purchase cheap vehicles for their taxi enterprises and some young men were too poor to enter the transport business at all. These studies therefore provide a counterpoint to much of the recent scholarship on youth in the west, which has tended to de-emphasize class and stress instead highly fluid subjectivities. The work of Demerath (1999), Jeffrey et al. (2004), Hansen (2006) and others shows that class, caste and other axes of social inequality do not determine how young men negotiate un/under-employment; young men’s trajectories and cultures are diverse because they have varied aims in life, individual personalities and agendas, and respond to specific opportunities and constraints in different ways. But the distinctive histories of individual class/caste/racial or religious groups are crucial in shaping young men’s ability to navigate economic uncertainty and un/under-employed young men are active in producing and reproducing these “old” forms of difference and inequality. At the theoretical level, these observations on the continued importance of social inequality in young men’s lives highlight the value of Bourdieu’s work on class and cultural practice. Bourdieu (1984; 1986) emphasized that un/under-employed young men are differently equipped to compete for scarce resources and respect. In particular, Bourdieu stressed the importance of cultural capital - the range of goods, titles and forms of demeanour that are “misrecognized” as legitimate within arenas of power – and social capital, defined as instrumentally valuable social bonds, in young men’s capacity to devise effective responses to conditions of employment scarcity. Individuals’ chances of success after leaving school or university depended on the economic, social, and cultural capital at their disposal. Bourdieu also directed attention towards how various types of capital are inculcated in people’s habitus: cultural dispositions written in to a person’s movements, reflexes and tastes, which are structured by people’s histories and also shape their future practices. In the case of competition for scarce employment, Bourdieu used the notion of habitus to highlight the ability of the rich to navigate markets for credentials and jobs with confidence and ease. Bourdieu emphasized richer young men’s “feel for the game,” or sens de placement, and a corresponding lack of social skill and critical awareness among marginalized un/under-employed young men. It is this “feel for the game” and the underlying social, economic and cultural resources that facilitate such acuity that distinguishes richer sections of the educated un/under-employed in the global south from more enduringly marginalized men. At the same time, however, Bourdieu’s schema rather implies that young men from subordinate groups will inevitably lose out to dominant classes and that they are incapable of meaningful political critique. A major strength of much recent feminist and post-structuralist work within geography and related disciplines has been to show that people are not trapped into acting in certain ways by their habitus (e.g. Butler 1997) and that gender and discourse mediates the processes through which various forms of capital are traded and performed (e.g. Reay 1995; Mahmood 2005; see also Ruddick 2003). In particular, Ruddick (2003) argues that discourses circulating within public culture influence how the habitus of young people is conceptualized. The next section of the paper uses a review of the political strategies of the educated un/under-employed in the global south to question both the socio-economic determinism of Bourdieu’s theoretical schema and the emphasis on depoliticization within Western youth research. |